Friday, April 18, 2008

"In 'The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism,' Robert Pape presents an analysis ofhis suicide terrorism data. He uses the data to draw inferences about how territorialoccupation and religious extremism afect the decision of terrorist groups to usesuicide tactics. We show that the data are incapable of supporting Pape's conclusionsbecause he 'samples on the dependent variable.' (The data only contains cases inwhich suicide terror is used.) We construct bounds (Manski, 1995) on the quantitiesrelevant to Pape's hypotheses and show exactly how little can be learned about therelevant statistical associations from the data produced by Pape's research design."